D&D (2024) Here's The New 2024 Player's Handbook Wizard Art

 

[Vaalingrade]

Considering D&D is supposed to be a game of the imagination, I don't think it helps anything for the art to just sit there reinforcing a half century old archetype.

 

[Azzy]

Since there's a

Heck, forget fanart, here is an official cover art portrait of Moraine from a relatively recent reprint:

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That's a nice piece of art.

 

[Cadence]

Your favorites are your favorites, no matter if they’re in anyone else’s Top Whatever lists. Also, by any sensible standard, Cook was one of the big names in fantasy of the 1980s-2000s, and left a lingering mark in the imagination of many of us. Rock on.

I'm kind of a fan. All the anthologies pictured on the lower right but two (iirc) have a short story by him. Not pictured are the latest anthology with a short by him (the latest Valor one is in the living room), and the Black Company d20 book by Green Ronin (on the game shelf). He has another short story coming out in print in another anthology soon that is available in e-form now.

Trying to stay vaguely on topic, the Taken in the Black Company give a nice take of the powerful ones, the Dread Empire has a wide variety of wizards of different power levels in it, and I like how the wizards on the hill are portrayed in the Garrett ones (although not a fan of the most notable one in the later books). Most of them have probably never appeared in art anywhere.

 

[nyvinter]

My favourite ones are from Graydon Saunders' books about the Commonweal — which are not well-known by any stretch of definition.

"Rust is not obviously anything. One of those people who could be thirty or fifty — Rust could be a schoolmaster or an architect or a team lead for a manufacturing collective, anybody in a trade both dry and not too dusty. Neat, clean, clothes and eyes are good and plain and honest."

"Hardly anyone seems to know Halt’s not a metre-fifty tall and looks like someone’s grandma. Maybe not your grandma, no-one in the Creeks is that delicate, even adjusting for scale, but someone’s." Halt also knits and rides a five tonne battle sheep.

"What must be Blossom rides up, between Rust and Halt’s conveyance. Regulation armour, what is perhaps a real horse, if you stretch “horse” a bit, and really quite a respectable salute."

"There’s this three-beat pause while the pleasant young officer — Blossom looks maybe nineteen — act falters a little, and you can see the sorcerer much more clearly." Blossom is an artist in destruction and on the send nothing less than a brigade if they make trouble list despite being under a hundred.

 

[Autumnal]

More people ought to know Grayson’s work. He was always a brilliant ideasmith and has developed into a very fine writer, by dint of years of hard work and paying attention to critiques. Back in Usenet days he was often nigh-unintelligible thanks to massively ingrown personal usages - he’s pretty severely autistic. But he always wanted to communicate better and kept working and working and working at it, and it paid off. I respect his accomplishments a lot.

 

[AkeishaRoberts]

I absolutely adore that artwork!!

 

[Parmandur]

Brandon SSanderson'sStprmligjt Archives is one of the biggest things in epic high fantasy literature these days, and here is the cover of Oathbringer featuring one of the more prominent spellcasters in that world, who is a woman of color:

 

[bedir than]

No mention of Brust yet, and the dude has nearly 20 novels all set in a world that is ripe for tales of D&D, with magicians.

 

[Demetrios1453]

Since there's a

That's a nice piece of art.

Yep, and exactly what is described in the scene in question, right down to her clothes (which were described a few pages earlier - Moiraine had dressed for the occasion on purpose, which other characters noticed). As I said earlier, the thought that female spellcasters can't dress in gorgeous outfits and still be functional magic-users is a ridiculous concept for anyone who has read Jordan's work.

And if we're talking about female spellcasters, well, one is just off-screen from this illustration (having already caused the flames in the picture), and is outputting nearly unthinkable amounts of magical power at this point (which is actually child's play for her). Moiraine is just about to commit to her counterstrike at the moment of the illustration, which is one of the most dramatic scenes in the entire 14-book series.

 

[Charlaquin]

Honestly, as other have said it was a a slow shift building up. But my theory is that the big push happened when the favoured world interaction shifted away from dungeon crawls towards more urban sandbox campaigns. Deception and slight of hand > brute force and reading scrolls.

Nerd/theatre kid/jock has nothing to do with it unless it's a movie made about the phenomenon that's set in a fictional 1980s.

Likely true. As I mentioned before, that post was mostly tongue-in-cheek, though to be fair I didn’t really give much indication of that fact.